Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com) [LWN.net]

Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com)

Posted Aug 12, 2004 8:16 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760)
In reply to: Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com) by dmantione
Parent article: Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com)

Can you cite me any other Linux distribution that, 5 years ago, or even now, had an installer that worked with 11 architectures and over 9000 packages?

And the problem solved by the installer as of today are also different in nature as the one solved some years ago. Integration with new hardware detection library for one.

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Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com)

Posted Aug 12, 2004 8:37 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

The amount architectures and packages in definately a point in favour of
Debian.

However, apart from hardware detection (which was completely absent by the
way), and booting, an installer is not that architecture dependend. So, IMHO,
the amount of packages and architecture cannot not have been an excuse for
being unable to code a better installer.

In fact, the matter only got attention after a series of bad reviews the previous
release got. I hope it is not too late. While this installer may make it a bit more
doable to install a system for many people, the expectations of people have
increased over the years.

@mark:

This is true. Debian did have an advantage. But that was a few years back.
You know, a few years back I had to write my own scripts to configure
Ghostscript in front of my jet-direct network printer (since it cannot be done
with a single print-queue). Today, no one wants to write his own scripts to use
his printer. And it is not need anymore. Today I can configure pre-filtter
queues, print-filter queues all from within YaST.

In other words, today people expect good tools. Some more than other; I,
personally, edit a lot of config-files by hand, but in general the expectation is
nowadays that all important settings can be done from the desktop, with as few
mouseclicks as possible. And this is what other distributions currently have
made great progress at. But the Debian people are still struggling with a
problem that other distributions have solved years ago.

Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com)

Posted Aug 12, 2004 18:15 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

But the Debian people are still struggling with a problem that other distributions have solved years ago.

I guess that depends on your point of view. The other Linux distribution installer I have significant experience with (RH, in various guises since 7.1 on), works fine, so long as nothing unexpected happens. When it does, you're screwed, and you've wasted a lot of time.

The Debian woody installer, OTOH, requires more attention. But it *works*. Yeah, you may have to handload some drivers, or replace the installation kernel if you've got fancy new hardware. It's really not for your Linux newbie. But then, neither is Debian, and I think this is what many people miss: not every distribution has to be aimed at rank beginners. There's room for a distribution that supports the experienced user, w/o getting in their way. I think the strengths of Debian are best appreciated by those who've suffered in the darkness :-).

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for a Debian installer that has a "click 3 times and go away" mode, but not at the expense of supporting obscure requirements and situations.

Review: Debian-Installer Release Candidate 1 (linux.com)

Posted Aug 13, 2004 13:43 UTC (Fri) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link]

Can you cite me any other Linux distribution that, 5 years ago, or even now, had an installer that worked with 11 architectures and over 9000 packages?

I was discussing exactly this with some Debian-using friends a couple days ago.

What's the point in supporting 11 architectures when those used in the real world are like 3 or 4? For people with particular needs I think a dedicated distribution would be much better than one you need to tailor to your needs after the install. When I installed Debian on my iBook a year ago or so, it installed APM (wich is x86-only) but not PMU (wich is its PPC counterpart) and told me it successfully configured X and networking but that wasn't the case. At all.

What's the point in supporting 9000 packages when many of them are just dead or used by a handful of people? What's the point in building packages on architectures where they will never be used? I mean, who's going to use GNOME on m68k or mips (I've checked, it is built, thank God OOo is not)?

My opinion is that a lot of resources are wasted in this approach and the Debian project could work much better if it focused more on the real world.

Diversity of architectures

Posted Aug 17, 2004 14:33 UTC (Tue) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link]

Just FYI, I did a lot of the experimental GNOME 2.6 package building and uploading for ARM, and even on a 200 MHz Netwinder (with 128 MB RAM), performance was quite acceptable. This is much slower hardware than many mips(el) machines, quite a bit slower even than most new handhelds. And numerous people use m68k machines for tasks for which you don't seem to have sufficient imagination.

Furthermore, for organizations with significant installed base of PA-RISC, SPARC or SGI (MIPS) workstations, S390 mainframes etc., or a mixture of architectures, the ability to install a modern desktop and server OS whose operation and administration is uniform across all of these arches is a tremendous benefit. Such machines also suffer vanishingly close to zero successful attacks even when left vulnerable for long periods of time, as they are immune to script kiddies who just pull the latest x86 or PPC exploits off the net. (Yes, there have been Linux PPC exploits, and they have caused significant damage.)